right track.
In the years since then archaeologists, palaeontologists and other detectives have found the bodies buried under the floor – Homo ergaster . . . Homo habilis . . . Homo
erectus . . . Homo heidelbergensis . . . Homo neanderthalensis – each evicted in turn, and all victims of time, the ultimate landlord. Then last of all, us, Homo sapiens
sapiens , the present tenants. Britain has been built, demolished, rebuilt, demolished and rebuilt againand again and again. I am living now among the remodelled ruins,
making the best of it.
The time of the first settlers – those that arrived in Britain after the ice – survives in the form of tools and talismans, pollen grains and fish teeth, bones of animals and humans;
a horse’s head etched onto a rib and a cave where ghostly shadows of stags and bison and birds stand breathless in the dark, awaiting the flickering light of torches. It was a time that
lasted for thousands of years.
It also survives, most magically of all, in footprints on a beach, every trail the proof of a life. And like any trail of footprints in the mud, those lives were at the mercy of the next
wave.
CHAPTER TWO
ANCESTORS
‘The deluge overthrew the land . . .’
From the Epic of Gilgamesh
‘ . . . and these stones shall be for a memorial . . . ’
Joshua 4:7
‘Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground . . . And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother,
and slew him.’
Genesis 4:2,8
We are haunted by history, not just as nations, but also as a species. Long before there were nations or countries there were just people. We split into groups from the very
beginning of course, as people do, based around families and tribes. But we were then and we are now all the same species – Homo sapiens sapiens. Caucasians, Asians, Negroes . . . just
as Labradors, Greyhounds and Mastiffs are all just dogs – so we are all simply folk, and mongrels at that.
Amidst all the ensuing complexity of race, society, religion and the rest, we have lost sight of how much we experienced together as one species. Most of the really big stuff – the making
of the people and the land – happened long before we started drawing lines and deciding who was in and who was out.
All of this – all of us – began in equatorial Africa well over a million years ago as Africans with black skins and the full suite of associated physical features. Warm-blooded
animals living in equatorial regions, those placesmost exposed to sunlight, have skins that secrete melanin to protect them from the most direct daily bombardment of
ultra-violet radiation anywhere on the planet. But one of the most important functions of skin is the production of Vitamin D, which it achieves by positively interacting with that sunlight; and at
the Equator the powerful melanin shield in black skin means black people need an hour or more of sunlight each day to make enough Vitamin D to avoid life-threatening conditions like rickets. (The
Inuit people of the Arctic regions, while often darker than northern Europeans, obtain their Vitamin D – and Vitamin C, for that matter – from a diet rich in fish skin, seal liver, yolk
from the eggs of birds and fish and the raw meat and blubber of seal, walrus and whale.)
As Homo sapiens migrated further and further north, into Europe and parts of Asia, the daily sunlight ration was progressively reduced. Individuals in more northerly latitudes also needed
to wear clothing to keep warm – further reducing the amount of skin they exposed to the sun. Those humans with the darkest skin would have been at a disadvantage, suffering physically as a
result of an inability to produce enough Vitamin D in less sunny climes. Factor in the added complication of the kind of climate associated with an Ice Age and you have a population of
black-skinned humans facing certain extinction if they remain far north of the Equator – or
In the years since then archaeologists, palaeontologists and other detectives have found the bodies buried under the floor – Homo ergaster . . . Homo habilis . . . Homo
erectus . . . Homo heidelbergensis . . . Homo neanderthalensis – each evicted in turn, and all victims of time, the ultimate landlord. Then last of all, us, Homo sapiens
sapiens , the present tenants. Britain has been built, demolished, rebuilt, demolished and rebuilt againand again and again. I am living now among the remodelled ruins,
making the best of it.
The time of the first settlers – those that arrived in Britain after the ice – survives in the form of tools and talismans, pollen grains and fish teeth, bones of animals and humans;
a horse’s head etched onto a rib and a cave where ghostly shadows of stags and bison and birds stand breathless in the dark, awaiting the flickering light of torches. It was a time that
lasted for thousands of years.
It also survives, most magically of all, in footprints on a beach, every trail the proof of a life. And like any trail of footprints in the mud, those lives were at the mercy of the next
wave.
CHAPTER TWO
ANCESTORS
‘The deluge overthrew the land . . .’
From the Epic of Gilgamesh
‘ . . . and these stones shall be for a memorial . . . ’
Joshua 4:7
‘Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground . . . And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother,
and slew him.’
Genesis 4:2,8
We are haunted by history, not just as nations, but also as a species. Long before there were nations or countries there were just people. We split into groups from the very
beginning of course, as people do, based around families and tribes. But we were then and we are now all the same species – Homo sapiens sapiens. Caucasians, Asians, Negroes . . . just
as Labradors, Greyhounds and Mastiffs are all just dogs – so we are all simply folk, and mongrels at that.
Amidst all the ensuing complexity of race, society, religion and the rest, we have lost sight of how much we experienced together as one species. Most of the really big stuff – the making
of the people and the land – happened long before we started drawing lines and deciding who was in and who was out.
All of this – all of us – began in equatorial Africa well over a million years ago as Africans with black skins and the full suite of associated physical features. Warm-blooded
animals living in equatorial regions, those placesmost exposed to sunlight, have skins that secrete melanin to protect them from the most direct daily bombardment of
ultra-violet radiation anywhere on the planet. But one of the most important functions of skin is the production of Vitamin D, which it achieves by positively interacting with that sunlight; and at
the Equator the powerful melanin shield in black skin means black people need an hour or more of sunlight each day to make enough Vitamin D to avoid life-threatening conditions like rickets. (The
Inuit people of the Arctic regions, while often darker than northern Europeans, obtain their Vitamin D – and Vitamin C, for that matter – from a diet rich in fish skin, seal liver, yolk
from the eggs of birds and fish and the raw meat and blubber of seal, walrus and whale.)
As Homo sapiens migrated further and further north, into Europe and parts of Asia, the daily sunlight ration was progressively reduced. Individuals in more northerly latitudes also needed
to wear clothing to keep warm – further reducing the amount of skin they exposed to the sun. Those humans with the darkest skin would have been at a disadvantage, suffering physically as a
result of an inability to produce enough Vitamin D in less sunny climes. Factor in the added complication of the kind of climate associated with an Ice Age and you have a population of
black-skinned humans facing certain extinction if they remain far north of the Equator – or
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